Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the amount and variety of media content available for delivery to users of public and private networks such as the Internet. Because this content is delivered from a wide variety of sources in numerous different formats use, hardware and/or software capable of transcoding, transrating, or otherwise modifying media content may be used to convert requested content to an appropriate format for delivery to and playback by clients. However, extensive delays in satisfying a user's request for content can significantly detract from the user's experience. As a result, there is a need for hardware and/or software that can deliver media content to a wide variety of different clients using low-latency techniques for modifying and transmitting the content to the appropriate clients.